Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute)

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Years of research allow Seow to trace the multifarious consequences of seemingly mundane geology. To say he mastered the technical minutia is to risk considerable understatement. Seow delineates coal’s role in East Asia’s industrialization, tracing its mutual dependence with every sinew of the wider society." — James Herndon, Asian Review of Books Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019). VS: Perhaps a good place for me to start is by laying out what I mean by “carbon technocracy.” So I use this term to describe a modern regime of energy extraction that is defined by a statist commitment to industrial development based on access to cheap and abundant sources of carbon energy and a desire to marshal science and technology toward this end. It is both an ideal and a sociotechnical system that the ideal helps bring into being. An exploration of the effects of intensive coal mining on the evolution of East Asian energy systems. This book began as Seow’s doctoral dissertation at Harvard, a genealogy that’s apparent in the stupendous depth of research. He cites countless primary documents: Chinese, Japanese and US government records, internal Mantetsu training manuals, professional engineering journals, and much else, besides. The secondary sources across the social sciences are just as thorough, allowing him to situate the particular in the general. Thankfully, this erudition never feels forced. Rather, Seow’s considerable labor rewards readers with clear exposition of both the mine and its inhabitants.

At Harvard, I offer a range of courses on the history of science and technology in China and East Asia and on topics related to industrial society more broadly, such as the history of the factory and the sciences of work. I advise graduate students working on science and technology in China, Japan, and Korea, as well as those focusing on other geographical areas who are interested in the nexus of technology, capitalism, and the environment. My work with graduate students has been recognized with the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award. Throughout the book, the mine acquires agency of its own, an insatiable force that swallows the adjacent town and countless lives. But in every chapter Seow reminds readers of the human beings in and around Fushun: people like Liu Baoyu, powerless to halt Mantetsu’s destruction of his ancestral burial plot, Mo Desheng, a child hiding amongst his family’s corpses during a wartime massacre, and Xiao Jun, the Fushun miner purged by the CCP when his novel Coal Mines in May paid insufficient homage to the Party. In 2021, China launched the world’s largest carbon market in furtherance of its “dual carbon” goals of peak emissions in 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. That same year, China set a new record for coal production, extracting over 4 billion tons. How any country could reconcile such output with rising environmental standards remains to be seen. But whatever else one can say about China’s Communist Party, they’re not averse to grand projects. Their ambitions in this case extend far beyond engineering better solar panels or retrofitting power plants: Chinese energy policy will affect everything from business investment and household consumption to climate change and international agreements. And while today’s challenges seem unprecedented, fossil fuels have long preoccupied China’s rulers. Victor Seow’s new book Carbon Technocracy offers a valuable perspective on current dilemmas by exploring three 20th-century regimes that made Chinese coal central to their plans. And I have been giving additional thought to writing of late because of the work I am doing on my next book. This is a history of industrial psychology in China from the 1930s, when the first study in this subfield was carried out, to the present, in which it exists, as elsewhere, in its contemporary form as industrial-organizational psychology. By tracing this history, I seek to examine how work becomes and functions as an object of scientific inquiry and how the sciences of work intersect with larger social discourses about the nature and value of labor.Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth. Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. At the same time, one major point that the book makes is that the technological and infrastructural legacies of the Japanese empire in Manchuria served as an important foundation for the post-1949 Chinese state’s pursuit of carbon technocracy and socialist industrialization. Here I join scholars who have advanced a similar argument such as Ramon Myers, Matsumoto Toshirō, Daqing Yang, Amy King, and Koji Hirata. China, the world's largest consumer of fossil fuels today, has until recently been neglected by energy historians. Carbon Technocracy corrects this injustice with great erudition and depth. Seow, an assistant professor of the history of science at Harvard University, has spent more than a decade studying the Fushun colliery, known for most of the twentieth century as East Asia's coal capital. The result is a fascinating case study on the history of a fossil fuel hub under different political regimes over more than a century." — Clarence Hatton-Proulx, Environment and History According to an analysis by the Rhodium Group, in 2019, China’s annual greenhouse gas emissions “exceeded those of all other countries combined.” 1 China’s turn to coal and the rise of its fossil fuel economy happened later and faster than for Western countries. So how did we get here? This is one of the questions behind Victor Seow’s Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia. Seow offers a study of East Asia’s coal capital, Fushun Colliery–the region’s largest coal-mining operation and the birthplace of the Chinese fossil fuel economy. Carbon Technocracy is a book that traces the history of one mine yet never loses sight of Fushun’s global significance. Grounded in archival research across multiple languages, Seow’s sources range from mining records to novels and newspapers to the papers of key individuals. The book maintains, too, a robust dialogue with contemporary work across the energy and environmental humanities. It is, as Seow puts it, “A genealogy of our current predicament.” 2

Opened by Chinese merchants at the start of the last century, Fushun’s coal mines were occupied by Japan during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and placed under Mantetsu’s management soon after. Following the fall of Japan’s empire in 1945, the Fushun colliery was seized first by the Soviets, then the Chinese Nationalists, and finally the Chinese Communists, under whose control it has since remained as a state-owned enter-prise. Throughout, operators maximized their hauls by deploying various technologies of extraction. They turned not only to methods like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage to more completely extract carbon energy from the earth but also to mechanisms like fingerprinting and calorie counting to do the same with human labor. Fushun was the model of modern coal mining in China and Japan, and images of its immense open pit fed fantasies of energy-intensive industrial modernity in Tokyo, Nanjing, Beijing, and beyond. Ultimately, what does Seow’s concept of “carbon technocracy” help us to better understand? There are too many insights to adequately summarize here. Among them is how Japanese imperialists developed the coal mines in a manner that sharply limited Chinese workers’ organizing capacities both within and beyond the Fushun colliery. Their emphasis on technological refinement to maximize worker productivity (whether in terms of fingerprinting workers or improving pumping systems) inscribed racialized hierarchies and precluded civic actions on workers’ part. Seow carefully situates these developments amid rivalries between imperialist powers that commonly regarded “machines as the measure of men” and natural resource control as key to national survival. [6] Seow’s emphasis on the ways that inter-imperialist competition spurred technocratic impulses helpfully takes us away from culturalist explanations of technocracy’s appeal in East Asia (19). Further, Seow’s descriptions of mine operations show the entwinement of technological advances and fantasies of limitless carbon extraction. From this we see how groups as politically opposed as Mantetsu, the KMT, and the CCP all shared the desire to maximally extract fossil fuels and thereby created and perpetuated the logics of “carbon technocracy.” Among the tragedies of this commonality, as Seow underscores in the epilogue, is that the biosphere is indifferent to the political leanings of whoever is extracting and burning the fossil fuels. The impact of this extraction and burning also lands much more heavily on disenfranchised populations around the world. [7] Q: How is Fushun viewed today? When was it at its peak, and what factors were most critical in determining the colliery’s rise and fall?Carbon technocracy, so defined, could be observed as a striking common denominator across the otherwise different political regimes in this book, from the imperial Japanese to the Chinese Nationalists to the Chinese Communists. My contention, though, is that this extends across the industrial world, and has characterized our relationship with both fossil fuels and the sources of energy touted as alternatives to coal, oil, and gas. MEC: It’s now fairly common among China historians to “cross the 1949 divide” and point out continuities between the Chinese Nationalist and Chinese Communist states. What I’ve seen less frequently is also bringing the period of Japanese rule into the story and knitting the three together, as you do. How does the concept of “carbon technocracy” enable you to draw a throughline in the history of these three governing regimes?

My name is Victor Seow (pronounced “meow” with an “s”), and I am a historian of technology, science, and industry, specializing in China and Japan in their global contexts and in histories of energy and work. In my research, I set out to better understand how technological artifacts, scientific knowledge, and forces of production have intersected in shaping economic life and environmental outcomes in modern industrial society. A particular strength of this book lies in Seow’s befitting elucidation of the science and technology of coal mining, which allows the materiality of Fushun’s coal deposits to shine through the convoluted social, political, and economic realities of energy regimes…. This is a book of the history of technology with substantive technology." — Ju-Yi Roshnii Chou and Kuang-chi Hung, East Asian Science, Technology and Society Seow connects decades surrounding East Asia’s energy production to develop a complex connection between energy in the elemental, carbon sense to power in the political and economic sense. Fushun Colliery, for example, was an open-pit coal mine that opened in the early twentieth century as a crucial resource to a rapidly developing nation. Since its founding, it has been seized by different political powers: Communist and Nationalist, Japanese and Russian, and seen the change in carbon technology used to mine it. As the world grew greater needs for energy, greater technology was not the only thing that needed to accommodate massive needs in energy. Greater demands on coal and coal-based energy put greater strain on workers themselves. Overworking and harsher conditions all contributed to the history of a mine and the people who were involved in its production, its laborers, its overseers, its experts.Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell University Press, 1989)